


false dichotomy

by ndnickerson



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ndnickerson/pseuds/ndnickerson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elliot Lawrence doesn't quite prove to be their salvation, but it's close. Post-S4.</p>
            </blockquote>





	false dichotomy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pepperlandgirl4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepperlandgirl4/gifts).



> Thanks to htbthomas and fairy_tale_echo for their help.

1.

Elliot doesn't really know why he does it. The walk from SCDP to Central Park is a miserable one, and he snaps the collar of his peacoat against his neck to keep the late November chill off his skin. He has a few hours to kill, before another pitch meeting, and the prospect of sandwiches at the local lunch counter in lieu of the usual steaks and cocktails depresses him.

The bulk and majesty of the Met draw his desultory gaze before he can actually enter the park, and Elliot stands at the end of the block with his hands in his pockets, drawing in great lungfuls of exhaust and bitter dry leaves and rain. New York isn't what it once was, not to him or to anyone, but he can't deny that its restlessness and brusque charm suit him, and making the trip on Belle Jolie's dime is all the sweeter. Pigeons and schoolchildren cluster and strut on the museum steps, their conversations punctuated by the blasts of taxi horns and the eyebrow-waggling wheedling street vendors. The artists, bundled in mufflers and caps and fingerless gloves, digits smudged with pastels and charcoal, stare up at the facade, willing their own blank canvases into works worthy of the museum's hallowed walls.

He doesn't know what he's looking for, what he's waiting for, but inside there will be heat and quiet. Elliot makes the first few halting steps toward the main entrance, his progress temporarily halted in consideration of a street vendor's promise of steaming, if passable, coffee, when he hears it.

"Hey, Roman."

The voice, he's never heard in his life. The words are just as unfamiliar. Elliot glances up from a formless distracted crowd toward the row of easels, bitter sunlight dappled through curling brown leaves.

The men huddled in tattered hand-me-down coats do reproductions and caricatures and sketches, anything for a few dollars, and they have the kind of faces he's learned not to look at too closely, not here in the city. Their eyes are too bright and that razor thin edge in their voices makes his own throat tighten in impotent sympathy. From twenty paces away he takes in the scene, their unguarded camaraderie.

When Elliot sees him, all he feels is relief, relief that Sal hasn't succumbed to a fate Elliot can't even verbalize. Sal's usually smooth cheek is dusted with stubble and his frame has gone leaner, but it's him.

Elliot knows his voice will shake, and is both pleased and disappointed when it doesn't. "Time for a sketch?"

"Sure—"

His eyes are that same muddled amber when they catch Elliot's, and he sees something in Sal deflate. Sal has his own niche here, and the person he was at Sterling Cooper isn't a part of it.

"I have an ulterior motive," Elliot admits, his eyes sparkling. "I also need some intelligent conversation over a steak lunch, and you look like a good prospect."

\--

Sal holds back on asking until after the usual stumbling conversational openers, as they plunge down the sidewalk, hands balled into fists in their pockets, the wind darting needle-thin fingers through seams and the minute spaces between their teeth, stinging as they gulp it down.

"So you're still there? Sterling Coop?"

Elliot nods. "SCDP. That Olson girl's a crackerjack."

Elliot very carefully, at the time and ever since, avoided finding out what had happened, mostly because it wasn't talked about and he didn't want anything else to sour him when it came to SCDP. Despite Sal's absence, it still felt like a link to him. Elliot had been just as shocked as anyone to find out about Lucky's defection and Draper's public, possibly genius, temper tantrum. When Sal gives his haltingly vague account of his last few days at the agency, most of which is obviously a lie, when Elliot reads between the broadly drawn lines he can't help but feel the Lucky defection was all some sort of cosmic revenge.

Sal's hands are smudged but his nails are still neatly trimmed and his palms look soft and Elliot looks away as Sal carelessly rolls his water glass in his hands. "I just kept-- keep feeling it every time I smell liquor on someone's breath."

Just like sambuca con la mosca has always made Elliot wonder what might have, what should have been.

When Elliot settles the tab, over Sal's genuine protest, he asks if Sal will still be at the park later, keeping his voice carefully neutral. If Sal has any idea, he gives no indication. It is a careful life they lead. It is a lonely life they lead.

\--

The board is stark black on the upper half, white on the lower, and the contrast makes the berry pout of the disembodied head's lips pop. The lipsticks are like proverbial sugarplums dancing above her head. The lower half is jammed with text, a sea of perfect typewriter text, and the breezy script of the Belle Jolie logo glows in its corner. Don chain-lights off his last and Elliot immediately quashes the momentary compulsion to ask if Draper was disingenuous when he declared, in sixty-point type, that he was quitting tobacco.

"I can't imagine this playing so well, were we to tie it in with a television commercial campaign."

Don has perfected the art of the poker face, but Elliot sees the widening of the eyes, the sudden hunger in the faces of those around the conference table. Elliot has never been much of a card player, much of a gambler. He prefers the calculated risks, the sure things. And he's sure that, if this works, he may be met with hostility. But he has to try.

"I'll be in town for a few more days. I know this is short notice, but could you work up some concepts in that time frame?"

"Yes, definitely, yes." He's always found Olson's gaze almost imperturbable, and her eyes are clear and direct as she stands. "Of course. Do you have any suggestion on what you'd like, or..."

"The best you have."

There was more noise here, before, in this frosted-glass air-castle. Being in the labyrinth of these offices has always made him imagine the figure of a man, building a good head of steam, launching through one of those perfect panes, the swan dive to the pavement far below. Their old office felt so close, as though inspiration spread with the speed and delicate insinuation of radiant heat between them, just as intertwined, just as stifled. Here they touch the sky. Here it's fresh new beginnings, shaking off the mistakes and betrayals and regrets, just to find new ones.

Maybe they've learned their lesson. Maybe they will.

\--

Sal says a good many things when they linger in the warmth of the coffee shop and Elliot tries not to judge whether they are true or whether Sal just wishes they were, and just listens. Sal seems not entirely unrelieved to see someone from his old life, and Elliot is bemused by the odd cognitive dissonance. Sal, who would rather have died than break the facade, is confiding because they are different from the rest, bound by what they have and what they want and the disappointing way those two spheres so rarely coincide.

"Kitty just sent me a picture of the baby."

"Yours?"

Sal stops just short of a derisive snort. "She's found someone back home, a history teacher of all things. The kind of stodgy man who wears cardigans and couldn't draw a straight line without help. She seems happy with him." The implication is clear and Elliot doesn't touch it.

"She really is a sweet girl."

Elliot nods. Outside the wind drives snowflakes into the glass and howls in approval. It's nearly Christmas, closer than not. Goodwill toward men, peace on earth. Sal has a tiny room somewhere, doubtless plastered with the detritus of past campaigns, of a life closed off to him now. He remembers a wistful expression, _where copy follows art, not the other way around._

"How many commercials did you do?"

Sal blinks at the sudden change in topic. "Why do you ask?"

"Because—" Oh, he has never enjoyed the elaborate dance of a bluff. "Because I have an idea. But it's up to you."

 

2.

They all look at each other, around the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce conference table. The memo has gone out about this year's Christmas "party" (and they're all putting mental quotes around it, because, my God, it will all be comped merch and a _homemade_ cake, it's like they're practically _frontierspeople_ ) and conventional wisdom has held that, despite the Topaz pickup and Birdseye's vote of confidence with an additional block of media buys, Roger will probably set fire to the Santa suit and cackle over the flames. With a highball glass in his hand.

The strange thing is how much they want it. They _want_ Roger angry and vengeful instead of subdued, ponderous. There has to be someone to go after with pitchforks, torches blazing, faces distended with enough anger to hide the fear that the relief over being allowed to stay is just dampening their realization of the inevitable.

Instead they wait for Don. They wait for Don to show them what to do, because alone, individually, in the freezing murky waters that surround them, he's the only one who has any clue of how to get out alive.

He walks in, Don, white shirt crisp, not a hair out of place, but there's something in the skin around his eyes, the slightest thinning of his lips, that makes each one of them clench, all around the table, tensing and waiting for the blow. They can't even look at each other, Peggy, Ken, Stan, Freddy.

(Peggy has very much compartmentalized the fact that glancing at Freddy reminds her far, far too much of her own father and how angry she is at him over dying so early and how much she's needed, _longed_ for him to come back, to find someone who can show her the things he could have, and reject that person irreparably to pursue her own life. She has pushed it down so deep that when she looks at Freddy she feels a smothered rage, simmering in her belly, and thinks that _men are soup but women can be too_ in Joyce's voice. By the time she stops holding it under and lets it rise, with the pensive weight of a long submerged glacier, it might break her.)

Then Don, his lips even slightly thinner, glances out the door and beckons with two fingers and what's unusual about this is that, in the brief time since he announced his engagement to Megan, he has been like a man exuding an ethereal calm, and this expression, this return to form, is both familiar and disturbing.

"We have a unique challenge in front of us," Don says, but the glimmer of hope in his words is momentarily forgotten when Sal walks into the conference room.

He looks different, here, at SCDP. Everyone looks different here. It takes a second for the smiles, the laughter, the enthusiastic hand-clasps, and Stan even has a line just beginning to furrow his low brow, but they can't stop glancing at Don from the corners of their eyes, waiting for a cue.

The rumors after he left included 

_Don and Sal were in Baltimore and Sal made a pass at Don and Don put up with it as long as he could but he couldn't do it anymore_

_Lee Garner Jr. walked in on Sal with the projectionist_

_Lee Garner Jr. walked in on Sal with Lois_

_Sal made a pass at Lee Garner Jr. and so Lee refused to work with him anymore_

but there are a hundred rumors ( _Peggy slept with Don to be made a copywriter, Alison left when Don wouldn't pay for her abortion, Roger slept with Ms. Blankenship and that was what killed her_ ) so probably, really, Sal had another job offer that fell through, and that's why he left. Slipped up so he would be forced out. Whichever.

Don clears his throat. "Belle Jolie wants a fresh spring campaign, with print and media tie-in. They specifically requested our old colleague, Mr. Romano here, who will oversee the art and shoots. Because we're already so close to time for unveiling, we need something in place by end of year at the latest—"

The entire room becomes one massive groan of protest. Don cuts through it with one quirked eyebrow and a commanding shout.

"Hey! If you want a Christmas party next year, get to work. I'll expect something by end of day tomorrow."

Peggy raids the stockroom (Sal makes some flippant comment about how many boxes of Luckys they have left even now) and Stan starts immediately with a pencil on onionskin, slashing bold lines, some subtle leer in the perspective on the lipstick tubes. Ken pulls up the chalkboard and Freddy takes the presentation pad. Within five minutes they all have drinks (Joan brought in a few bottles but didn't stay to serve them) and within an hour they've rejected everything. Well, Sal has rejected everything and Peggy says it just doesn't have that _something_ , and then Freddy is reminiscing about the focus group testing back at Sterling Cooper. Stan gets that look on his face and, briefly, fleetingly, light as a breath they think, _wonder how long he'll still be here._

They consider, reject, and consider again doing animation. Freddy mentions the same women he mentioned for Pond's and Peggy rolls her eyes and says maybe yes, maybe another girl too, and then Ken talks about splitting the target group and losing all of them. Sal is eyeing the jumble of pencils at the edge of the table and Megan brings in sandwiches, beaming and lingering a little too long at the door.

Then Peggy and Megan ask every single woman in the office how many lipsticks are in their purses and why they chose them and when they return Stan's shirt is rumpled and he's chortling out some story that makes Peggy moderately uncomfortable just for its tone alone, and Ken has his feet up. For a second Peggy flashes on Pete's face, that sneer he sometimes wears, especially when someone mentions that Kenny has been _published_ and she wonders if he walks through life looking for another story the way she looks for the next face of Robitussin or ideal situation for Tylenol.

They disperse and promise to brainstorm and regroup but the liquor is already starting to erode their resolve. Megan and Don walk out arm-in-arm and she's bubbling about something and Sal watches them go, watches Don walk out without looking back. Stan says something snide about Joan as she, hips swinging, heads for the door, and Stan's eyes are boring into the back of Peggy's head the entire time.

"I have an idea," she says, slowly.

 

3.

Peggy is intimately familiar with every single shot, angle, and pan of the entire commercial, but she's fascinated by it anyway. She tries not to think ( _Clio, Clio_ ) but can't help herself.

A woman's hand lingers just outside the frame, and as an alarm clock begins to ring the hand drifts into frame to turn it off. The woman to whom it belongs slides out of bed. A makeup bag on the edge of a white porcelain sink polished to a solemn cold gleam (and that shot lasts a fraction of a second, she remembers how they brushed every single speck of dust away, even though absolutely no one will see this pristinely gorgeous print on a broadcast network, through the static and nauseating vertical roll) and a hand vanishing within, emerging with a tube of lipstick. A woman dabbing at her lips, fully made up, hair freshly done, eyes sparkling. Confident swirl away from the mirror, shoulders back, seductive smile. A matte background, vanishing point well back in the sea of stenographers' desks, smiling confident woman. A perfectly plucked tissue wiping that lipstick away, just to replace it with a darker, bolder shade. The woman who walks into the next frame is a tall, long-legged woman who turns heads wherever she goes. The soundtrack is a catchy drum-heavy riff that makes her fingertips thrum in time.

 _Be any woman you want to be with Belle Jolie_.

It's over in what feels like a handful of seconds, and when the screen goes white, Peggy glances back at Sal. He has his arms crossed, a broad grin on his face.

It's almost perfect.

They had all been nervous ( _what about the Patio ad, remember that_ ) and Stan pulled his usual juvenile shit until Don called him in and he walked out chastened and loudmouthed like usual. Peggy eyes Stan now, that deep furrow in his brow, and is suddenly stricken by the thought that he's seen her naked, but she can read that look on his face because it mirrors her own thoughts just as plainly. As much as she'd like to say that what's up there on that screen is any percentage her ( _and she can still sometimes hear the echo of Don shouting "that's what the money is for!"_ ), it's mostly Sal. The storyboards, the sets, the rich jewel tones of the model's clothes, it's all Sal. It would have been so easy to mess up. They went through a thousand different permutations that would have reduced it to something awful or, worse, something merely mundane.

Part of it is Joyce, who seems to have connections everywhere and produced two dazzling aspiring actresses in the space of an afternoon. Joyce has also been badgering her all day to go to another one of their _things_ , the kind of thing that will involve some meandering twenty-minute film that will probably bear little to no resemblance to reality. Abe will hover at her side for a while but he won't be able to resist shouldering his way through the crowd, at once cynical and overeager, and when it's over he'll come back, his forehead damp from the seething writhe of humanity, and ask what it _provoked_ in her, and when she fumbles her way through some bullshit he'll namedrop Cassavetes and maybe tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, his touch light.

And not a single second of it, not all of it at once, not Abe's hand resting at the small of her back, none of it, will give her the feeling that watching their Belle Jolie commercial gives her. Whatever tiny part she had in it is hers to savor.

Elliot is quiet but profuse with his praise, a broad grin on his face as he shakes Sal's hand and starts talking about a simultaneous marketing campaign, and Peggy drifts off, imagining that with a swipe of lipstick she could become that girl. That's the whole point, after all. The model is close enough to seem realistic, perfect enough to be an ideal.

She doesn't feel right outside her own skin. She can't dance with the frantic loose energy that the other girls do, during those all-night parties, the air thick with marijuana smoke and impassioned conversation, the angry harsh edge of the college rock station. When she tries to listen she just gets angry - angry at their talk of "The Man," angry that their gazes become calculating and judgemental when she says that she works on Madison Avenue and doesn't immediately apologize for being part of the fascist capitalist system and its cruel puppetry.

The world moves at the speed of glaciers and they just can't see it.

Joan walks back into the conference room, patting at her lips. With the wisdom of hindsight Peggy is beginning to see the signs in Joan that she never recognized in herself, and to her knowledge no one has said anything at all. Even the usual crude remarks about the size of her breasts are rare. A baby with a charming Army surgeon. Megan and Don looking at wedding invitations. She's caught Megan gazing down at her flat belly with a considering hand splayed over it.

Peggy splashes another inch of amber liquid into her glass and tilts it down.

It takes her a few hours to figure out what, exactly, about their impeccable campaign is making her so angry. They have variations ready for teen-focused markets, for older-adult markets. Elliot says that, based on the campaign, they will have day and night lipstick pairs in special gift containers ready for the spring roll-out. Harry is rumbling about guest spots for the models on popular television shows.

It's something else Joyce said.

 _You can do the whole sex-marriage-babies-death thing_ , she had said. _Maybe that's your thing. Or maybe your thing is to find something else._

She wonders if Faye would agree, if she would be just as disturbed that Peggy has no option, no voice. There isn't even a box of colors for her anymore, just a pair, a set of masks for making her way through the day.

_Be who you want. As long as it's what we say you can be._

And that, in a nutshell, is how she ends up in the passenger seat of Don's car at three in the morning.

\--

"Want to talk about it?"

Peggy stops herself before glancing over at him (in surprise, shock, something) and shakes her head, fixing her gaze somewhere in the middle distance, through the passenger side window. His hair is floppy, the skin around his eyes faintly translucent, and he's clad in a disheveled flannel shirt and slacks. Give him a pair of slippers and he would look like a man spending a lazy Sunday morning trying to get over a bender.

She doesn't look down at her dress, its bright-orange-sherbet fabric too thin for the cold. Her face feels somehow slick and gritty at the same time and her brain is so hollow she can hear something sloshing around in a cloudy pool at the bottom, tracing languorous fingers down the back of her neck, tripping down the arch of her spine.

Too much alcohol and too much weed. She ran from the rest of the group, the rest of the party, too panicked to search for Joyce or Abe, when the cops raided the place. She ran from their spotlights and sneering shouts, and found herself shivering in a recessed doorway, a coat she'd never seen before hanging from one of her shoulders, the world obscured through the lace of her disheveled bangs.

She was too close to being caught that time. She had very tightly gripped that coat around her, holding herself as still as she could in that doorway until Don finally arrived, at once paternal and exasperated by her call.

"How is Sal doing?"

Peggy sighs and slides the fingers of one hand into her hair. "If Stan can ever figure out how to get along with him..."

Don shrugs. "I can't say I had any confidence while that commercial was being shot, but what do I know."

"He just took it and..." She shakes her head. "He walked through that room and took everything we were talking about and just ran with it. ...Turn here."

Don negotiates a turn. The streets of New York are never truly deserted, but the atmosphere is so different. She can feel the silence and desperation of everyone left awake, the diluted weight of their consciousness, the high frenetic pulse of that alien awareness, and then she shakes her head and thinks, No more. Not for a long time.

"Is there someone waiting up for you?"

"I doubt it. They usually just find somewhere else and take the party there."

Don stops the car where she directs. "I doubt Pryce will be very happy if he sees your name in the police blotter." His voice is carefully neutral and toneless.

Peggy pauses with her hand on the door. "I know."

"What you do on your own time..." He coughs and the expression on his face is almost rueful. "You can make your own decisions."

She nods. "There's just so little to choose from."

He touches her hand and she squeezes his, once, before sliding out of the car, gazing up at the silent facade of her apartment building.

It's only when she's keying in that she wonders whether Faye has found someone else, if she is listening to someone belittle and disrespect her work, if she's wishing she had found another way to love someone and be comfortable with herself.

The two spheres of her life, Abe and SCDP. They don't truly touch. She knows one day she'll have to choose.

She kicks off her heels and swallows a yawn and then, blessedly, doesn't think anymore.

 

4.

Roger sits at his desk, his gaze lightly touching that pure white chair, the alluring arch of his desk lamp, the swirl of dots on the opposite wall. Sinuous curves. He has a meeting with the Cancer people later in the week, and with any luck he won't have to wear eight layers.

Joan. She's wearing a short olive-green dress and he can see her silhouette through the pane of glass at his window as she bends over his secretary's desk. Lately, mostly since Jane has been knitting her delicately arched brows and peering at him through her lashes and drawing little circles on the lapel of his pajamas with the tip of her finger (he can hear only a quarter of what she says at that point), usually purring something that promises to become a whine about a baby, wouldn't a baby be nice, Roger hasn't been able to put Joan out of his head.

He never really has.

Sometimes he's not quite sure how he fell into Jane's arms, only that if it weren't for Greg...

No. That's not true. He walked through it all when he was dictating his memoirs, and while he had undoubtedly loved Joan, still did love Joan, Greg didn't really matter. She had made her choice.

But oh, the nights he's thought about having a taxi take him by her place, just to glance up into the warm square of golden light that is her street-side window, as aloof and unreachable as Rapunzel.

His secretary comes in to tell him that Joan has an announcement planned as soon as he gets back from his meeting. Five minutes later Don walks into Roger's office unannounced, with his usual air of tight self-control. Roger has never seen Don fully relaxed. The man acts as though he would be at home in a straitjacket.

Don holds an ivory business card between two scissored fingers, proffering it like a cigarette, as Roger straightens from his drinks tray. Roger has the barest hint of a premonition about what Joan's announcement might be, and he's going to drink until it goes away. He takes the card and glances down at it.

"You shouldn't have."

Don's lips quirk in something closer to a grimace than a smile. "I think it's time."

The agency's profile has been rising again, after that clusterfuck. They have new business, new accounts. Roger has been working on the Cancer people and, after the positive notice on the Belle Jolie campaign, they seem amenable, open to ideas, to some kind of campaign that might actually work. But it's all prestige, spec, child's play. They need more. Especially if they want to keep the staff they have.

The name on the business card means nothing to Roger. "Time for what?"

Don takes a breath through thin lips. "For me to say I'm sorry and that I'll be a good boy and we need to try again. I've heard some positive rumblings."

Roger tosses the card onto his desk and hefts the half-full vodka bottle (it always seems to be half-full, he can't remember the last time a liquor bottle stayed full in his office for more than twenty-four hours). He nods. "Right."

"He can get us in with Conrad Hilton."

Roger actually does pause, at that. "Really. And you think our new creative dream team is up to that challenge?"

They can't deny that, in that slow terrible time after the Lucky incident, morale was low. Everyone was waiting. Now is the time to do something big, bold, memorable, and, most of all, lucrative. Hilton would definitely be all of that. Sal has his own corner of the lounge and he spends every spare second he's not working on paid ads doing spec, or something less than spec. For a while Peggy worked exclusively with Sal, but she and Stan seem to have reached some sort of detente. Even so, Roger has seen Peggy's bladed palm describe a curve through the air and Sal nod in agreement and the result be something he could never have imagined, not really.

It's not perfect, but it is better, and if they were ever in a position to pick up Hilton...

"Should we work up some spec?"

"Not until we know what he wants. Trust me." Don's smile is wry.

_I asked for the moon._

Even so, Roger plants the idea in Sal's head before he leaves, walking by Peggy's office to see that she's on the phone, her expression serious. She's in something mustard colored and from the beginning he's had trouble seeing her as anything more than the timid secretary, the little mouse who haltingly asked for Rumsen's old office and now, now, commands more accounts than her predecessor.

Hilton.

Roger imagines that, even if nothing else, Conrad Hilton's disdain will trump Lee Garner Jr.'s indifferent apology.

 

5.

The cherry blossoms are just beginning to bloom when Joan Holloway Harris takes her taxi ride to the hospital.

She had a certain number of plans in place. Even after the disastrous, sentimental impulse that led her to leave the doctor's office, she had been thinking about it. She had been considering which lie to tell.

Greg died in Vietnam a week after she was supposed to have given birth, according to the entirely inaccurate timeline she had followed with every letter, every phone call. She had been gambling that the child would be a boy, and Greg responded with obvious pride to the news. And then she had called and his CO had spoken very gently, very softly, about _an accident_ and _pension_ and she had been frozen the entire time. Dr. Greg Harris, who bitched about the humidity, who talked about playing baseball with a son, who had no brain in his fingers, left her a widow.

She hasn't told anyone. She can't bring herself to tell anyone, not yet, not after the showers and cake and ridiculous advice. She can't bring herself to say it to Roger. Her engagement and wedding rings, wrenched from her finger as she stood beside him. Roger with that charming, melting gaze. Roger, who had to take another heart pill, his face drained pale, when she gave him the news after her announcement at the office, who had had the gall to confirm with just the barest question in his voice that the child was his. She had slapped his face and walked out, her mouth sewn tight shut to keep from screaming at him and ruining this careful charade.

Roger, who is responsible for this.

\--

It is the day of the Hilton prelim meeting. The wet bar is fully stocked. Don is actually smiling and laughing with Sal. Pryce sits with his fingers steepled, blinking owlishly through his thick glasses. Peggy has her hair smoothed back and looks, for possibly the second time in Roger's memory, like an actual adult who doesn't have to hold a parent's hand in a crowd and doesn't cover her eyes during the naughty bits during movies.

While Roger is very sure that Don was telling the truth ( _he can sense bullshit and he is serious even when he doesn't sound like he is_ ), Conrad has seemed friendly enough through all their meetings, phone calls, lunches. During Hilton's one meeting with Sal, Sal listened to Conrad and nodded, asked a few questions, made a sketch, and then retreated to the lounge, where he appeared to subsist on scotch and pretzel sticks for the better part of a week.

To have Hilton. To have the perks, the tradeouts, even a percentage of the American business. It's a new year. No more riding a bicycle around an empty soundstage. He doesn't have Garner to hold him back anymore, Roger tells himself. And this, finally, is something he can _do_.

For some reason it's Megan who comes to the door. Someone had to make sure everything was seamless today, and Joan called in sick.

"Mrs. Harris is on the phone for you, sir."

For some reason Roger glances at Don before meeting Megan's eager gaze. "Me? Oh. I'll call her back as soon as this is done."

\--

Roger Sterling's second child, a son, is born at eight-seventeen p.m. on Sunday, April 10, 1966. He's seven pounds, three ounces, and he's born screaming and bald and a prickly angry red.

Roger is in a bar halfway down the block at the time, staring at a glass of scotch.

"I always knew, you know."

Mona is picking her gloves off, one finger at a time, peering at him from under her lashes. Her purse is on the bar and she has a mod hat perched just-so on her hair. The barstool next to her is empty.

"No you didn't." Roger downs the glass and signals for another, then lets his head loll onto his hand, his arm propped up on the bar. "You didn't. I just finished _being_ a father."

"You never finish being a father."

What Roger is always struck by, now, is the affection that still lingers in Mona's gaze, that he feels rising in him in answer. The bitterness of their divorce, her jealousy over Jane, has all somehow faded. But Joan.

"And I assume the reason I'm here instead of Jane..."

Roger snorts. "As delicious as I'm sure you would find _that_ scene, no. As far as she's concerned, I'm at the office right now."

"The only thing that ever saved you was the extreme compartmentalization of your life, Roger."

"That and my dazzling wit." When the next drink arrives, he downs half of it in a gulp.

"And your dazzling wit." She smoothes her gloves out. "You have to do right by her. She's the one who's married to the doctor and he's in Vietnam, right? Is he on his way back? Because then—"

"Yeah, I found out that he won't be coming back."

Mona gasps, quietly. "Oh."

" _Oh._ " Roger nods in agreement, the glass wavering a little in his hand. "Oh yes. Oh yes."

"So."

"So we are _this_ ," Roger holds his index finger and thumb a hair's breadth apart, "close to landing Hilton, so close I can feel it, and everything feels like it's actually running again, and then..."

"And then?" Mona's brows arch in disbelief. "You mean nine months ago."

Roger shrugs lazily. "You always were one for the little details."

"Like the little detail of a squalling son half a block away."

"Like that."

\--

He waits until he's mostly sober again, although his head is still pleasantly clouded. Even that isn't enough to explain what happens to him when he walks into that room.

Joan is sitting up in bed and the hospital gown is so washed out that it's almost the pale cream color of her skin, and she has a blue blanket in her arms, and in that blanket is Roger's son.

And she looks up at him with those big blue eyes and she holds her face so solemn for a moment that she looks like she's on the verge of tears, and then she smiles and her gaze drops from him to her son. Their son.

"What are we gonna do, Joanie."

"We aren't going to do anything." Her voice is suddenly cool, clipped serenity. "I'm well aware of what your solution was. This was my choice. I just thought you had a right to know."

"I was an ass."

"You were."

"I didn't think—"

"I know." The baby looses a few choked cries, and she gently jiggles him. "I'm not going to tell Jane, if that's what you're worried about."

Roger sits down. "That's definitely not what I was worried about. But thanks."

"Least I could do." And then Joan gives him the smallest smile and he touches his son's cheek and sighs.

\--

Joan brings the baby to SCDP the first warm day of that spring. He's in blue checks with a terrycloth bib and the secretaries gather around him and coo, their eyes bright. Roger can feel his chest swell with pride and has to remind himself that, for all intents and purposes, that child in Joan's arms is Scott Harris, son of an Army surgeon, and his only role should be polite interest.

He sees Megan looking at Don and knows she's seeing herself with a Draper baby on her knee. Peggy's expression is frozen, almost stony, and then she arranges her features into something resembling, but not quite, a smile. Sal barely glances at the child, and Pete comes over to offer his own well-intentioned, if wildly inappropriate, parenting advice.

They haven't slept in a week. It's Conrad Hilton day. Roger has been sure that he can somehow undo it all, to turn their bad luck around. It starts here. It starts with this, with a damaged art director, a secretary who found herself in trouble after a rushed interlude in an alley, a copywriter who has eaten, slept and breathed nothing but work since their initial meeting with Hilton. And Don, who for a while seemed well on his way to an early heart attack.

Everyone else said they wouldn't last a year. They were supposed to fail. They were supposed to crash and burn in spectacular fashion.

But Roger Sterling has a son today, and nothing can touch him.

He walks out, toward them, toward faces that are no longer tensed in fear, no longer furrowed with dismay.

"Knock it out of the park, Don."

Don gives him a tight smile. "We will."


End file.
